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What is System-On-Chip or SOC compared to CPU

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How much do we know about our smartphone’s SoC or System-on-chip? We are familiar with Samsung Exynos, Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Helio and such as CPUs, but are they really just CPUs? In this article, we will tackle what is SoC and the difference compared to CPU or Central Processing Unit.

SoC and CPU

SoC stands for System-on-Chip. Yes, we do know what is a system but what is this system actually. The system that we are referring consist of the CPU, GPU, RAM, wireless radios, power management circuits and mostly everything that runs your smartphone. If we say CPU, we are just talking about its raw processing power just like Intel and AMD’s CPU found on computer desktops. Just plain CPU, nothing else.

Difference of SoC and CPU

Just like we’ve mentioned, SoC is made up of several components that are found on a single chip. It is bigger in size compared to CPU but packs more functionalities thus giving more space for battery. The difference of SoC to CPU is its flexibility but what is a CPU.

The CPU is the main processing unit that fetches data and performs several algorithms. Put it simply, the things you do on a desktop computer from opening an application, listening to music, and transferring files, these are processed by the CPU itself. In order for these to work seamlessly, CPU works together with various components such as RAM or GPU. Its flexibility to work with other components gives the option for upgradeability if a desktop user wants to improve a specific hardware.

Such can’t be done to SoC given that several components are integrated with each other. It’s possible but very expensive to adapt.

If you want to see how various SoC perform compared to each other, check out this post.

We hope we were able to provide some basic knowledge regarding with SoC and CPU. If you have any suggestions regarding with this article, share it in the comment section.

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